Anthropic, June 12, 2026

“The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.“

By now you probably know that BIML believes the “Mythos is too dangerous to release” thing was mostly great marketing spin. We made our position on this clear way back in April and even said so to the NY Times. Sure, advanced LLM models can be helpful if you want to break software, but they can be just as helpful fixing software security problems. Bottom line for BIML based on lots of conversations with hands on hackers and software security types: we don’t find Mythos much more dangerous than any other advanced LLM models. And just so you know, we are used to this “tools go both ways” thing in software security.

Further, we don’t think anyone has a clue about how to measure or compare the security of LLMs. That’s what our latest big paper, No Security Meter for AI, is all about. Give it a read. What makes Mythos more dangerous than, say Opus 4.8? Nobody knows how to measure that. Really. Not even Anthropic.

So what about this export control situation? According to David Sacks, a Fable 5 jailbreak (intentionally tickled by trusted advisor “red teaming”) caused the government to step in and declare certain models munitions. The logic seems to go, if you can jailbreak Fable 5, you get Mythos-level “cyber cyber.” Anthropic disagreed that the jailbreak is serious, the Administration put on the export control restriction, and here we are.

Huge irony number one is that Anthopic was the one who started all this with the “too dangerous to release” spin. I guess the US government people who made this decision have not kept up with their BIML reading! Alas. Anthropic is now lying in the bed they made.

Though this sort of thing may come as a shock to non-security people, lots of us old school security people remember the crypto wars (before “crypto” came to mean high bullshit “currency”) and what happened when the US Government banned the export of certain kinds of cryptographic algorithms. Bottom line, that didn’t work at all and it made the US Government look pretty silly for trying to outlaw certain kinds of math. Deja vu all over again. Outlawing software?? What?

Huge irony number two is that the US Government may be accidentally crippling US AI by stepping in with a barely-thought-through export control restrictions. Which foreign governments and companies want to be subject to the whims of the current administration when it comes to AI? Better to use Chinese models or open weight models. (You rememebr what happened when the US government tried to outlaw math, right? It greatly helped foreign companies take market share.) Starseer’s guest blog post, Your Frontier Provider Is Quietly Limiting Your Capability & Research, pursues this angle but from a pure business perspective.

Anyway, we’re not sure which irony is more delicious. I guess using security FUD is a terrible idea for both companies and governments.

Ultimately, at BIML we believe everyone should just fix the damn software instead of trying to control powerful tools that find bugs. We want our Fable 5 access back too.